Category archive for: on a personal note

Here we are on the cusp of 2016. I hate to wave my hand at 2015 and call it “a bad year,” because some close friends of mine had major happy milestones this year—marriages, births, promotions, etc.—and, despite all the pain and frustration, I ended the year finally back in the only place I’ve ever felt homesick for, with my spouse and my birds and my chinchilla…

I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, for five years, which taught me some things about winter. I don’t claim to be an expert or the most awesome at winter—I mean, I did leave, right?—but I listened when long-time Alaskans talked, and I observed which advice helped the most. For your use and mine, here is the advice I’ve gathered from friends, coworkers, strangers, and the internet, about how to thrive when the days are short and cold.

We have this ideal, in American society, of a “low maintenance” person, and I get the sense that the ideal is especially important for women to meet. We should be easygoing. We should not complain, and whatever is offered to us should be enough, should be accepted with gratitude. We must never impose on others. Taken to its logical conclusion, it also means suffering should be done in silence.

I’m a good project planner, great with logistics. I had backup plans for my backup plans. But I also had a chronic illness to contend with, and the one place where I should have known to build in extra leeway—the parts involving physical labor and the ability to sleep soundly in adverse conditions—were the parts where everything went sideways. And, oddly, they were the parts for which I’d done the least contingency planning.

I wrote last year about the physical side of my particular chronic illness, psoriatic arthritis. Most of what I said in that post is still true: I’m still on methotrexate, still not pain-free, still not doing everything I should to take care of myself. There have been some promising steps…

I’m moving to Pittsburgh again! Yay! Dale (my Mr.) and I will be there by August 10th. He’s got a cool job, and I’m not looking hard for a job, because I like consulting. Also, our friends are THE BEST!

This is delicious by itself, with rice, as a taco or quesadilla filling, or, if you want to combine it with some scrambled eggs and a little cheese, in a breakfast burrito. Sour cream goes nicely with it, especially if you get it too spicy. ;) Although it’s very good…

Edit, over a month later: Turns out, something very much like the device I was complaining that nobody had designed has since been announced. It’s fairly attractive, can be worn in a number of different ways (no word on its accuracy, though), and it has an inactivity alert. Bonus: it…